


The Price of Horses

by Pugnash



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dehumanization, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Touching, Post-Battle of Five Armies, dark!Thranduil - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-22 01:41:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1571294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pugnash/pseuds/Pugnash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kili and Thorin are grievously wounded after the battle, and Thranduil agrees to heal them and Fili for the sake of the alliance. But he will not do so without recompense. </p><p>For the kinkmeme prompt "Thranduil agrees to heal the Durins so he can see each of them naked".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for sexual assault: I chose not to including a non-con warning in this fic because it doesn't contain sex or the intention of sex, but I warn that it still includes assault/harassment of a sexual nature. 
> 
>  
> 
> [Original prompt here at the kink meme](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/9471.html?thread=21094399#t21094399)

After he makes his promise to save Thror’s line, Thranduil goes to the young one first. Tauriel’s little black-haired archer. The boy’s name whispers around the curve of Thranduil’s ear, but he brushes it aside. His father taught him to raise horses, but not to name the foals until he was sure they’d live. He should have taught Tauriel the same – not that it matters to her now. 

The lad is in a divided section of Dain’s tent. A messenger has gone ahead and the dwarves on guard let him through with stiff bows. Three of Thorin’s mismatched company sit in the lamplight beyond, hunched together like rats around scraps. Oin stands as he sees their visitor. Thranduil knows his name, for he respects healers no matter their origins. He dips his head to the old dwarf. 

“He’s this way,” Oin mumbles, picking up one of the lamps and leading Thranduil onwards. There are golden plates and silk hangings displayed around the tent, spoils of the reclaimed mountain. They glint like eyes watching the Elf-king pass. Beyond the next canvas door is a small, octagonal room that smells of decay and precious bodily fluids. The boy lies sleeping on a makeshift pallet. With his arms by his side and his face drained of blood he looks already dead, but the layers of blankets well show his companions care for his life. 

“We left the spear-point in, and gave him poppy-milk,” Oin reports, his hands picking at each other. He smells salty from the battle. There is still a little mud on his neck. “What do you need?”

“Cloth and bandages boiled and dried, and a basin of clean, hot water,” Thranduil says, his hands still clasped behind his back. “Then you can leave me; tie the door closed so I am not disturbed by anyone.”

“I’ll be silent if you let me stay,” Oin stammers. “If I could learn even a little of your skill—”

“No,” Thranduil answers, and does not look at him again. 

He takes off his coat and folds it by the door. He kneels and begins to peel back the blankets from the boy – Kili, the name slips into his skull unbidden, and he cannot dismiss it as easily as he can dismiss Oin. Thranduil takes note of every wound and its urgency. There are bandages showing through a jagged tear in Kili’s tunic, leaking blood in layers that are dried at the edges and wet in the centre, as shapely as the spreading petals of a flower. A cut on the side of his face has been stitched inexpertly but not intolerably. Other than that are bruises, scratches, nothing that will kill him. There is no movement behind his eyes, but his lips part and shiver with each shallow breath, and one arm twitches in some pained dream. 

The promised water and cloth arrive at his side, but Thranduil does not even look up to see who delivered them. He rests back on his heels, his hands closed upon his thighs, until he hears the hush of the canvas being tied off. 

He sets himself to his work. He leaves the spear-wound for now. His long fingers brush down the centre of the dwarf’s torso and unbind the ties of Kili’s trousers. He grips the belt and slides layers of cloth down over the boy’s legs. Thranduil pauses to remove the boots, his features clenching with a flash of irritation that the dwarves have left their patients’ shoes on in bed, and then at last the trousers are dropped in a crumpled heap at the foot of the pallet. 

Thranduil takes a firm hold of Kili’s hip and shoulder and slowly rolls him onto his side. Kili is heavy as sandbags and he tenses, but does not wake, only dragging his hand up to curl beside his face. Now Thranduil can inspect the arrow wound from days earlier. Tauriel reported that it would have killed him if she had not intervened. Thranduil unwinds the rough hessian around Kili’s leg. The puncture is a black scab like a parasite, and the skin around it is red and warm under his fingertips – but the blush is healthy enough. It is not septic, and Kili would not be alive now if the poison was still lingering in his blood.

“She did at least one thing right,” Thranduil says softly to the empty room. 

He lets his hand rest with his fingers curled around the back of Kili’s bent knee, feeling skin that was chilled by the winter air grow warm beneath his touch. His thumb traces the crease above the kneecap, and then he lets his hand slide down Kili’s brown calf as if of its own accord. He tightens his grip, feels thick muscle beneath the dark-furred skin. His little finger brushes Kili’s ankle, and he withdraws, clasping both his hands in his lap. 

For a while Thranduil only looks, watching goosepimples rise on Kili’s legs, and then he rolls him onto his back again. His member lies snug in a nest of thick fur, short and stout as all things dwarf. Thranduil reaches for the bottom button of Kili’s tunic. He unhooks it slowly, feeling his own heart quicken, then moves onto the next. He pushes the filthy cloth aside as he goes to reveal a belly covered in a thicker, darker pelt than even his legs, and a paunch that has not quite lost its youthful roundness despite weeks of travel. On the third button, he hears a hitched breath and looks over. The boy is awake, if barely, eyes glazed and head turning away from the sharp lamplight.

Thranduil says nothing and continues to unbutton the tunic. When the collar is open at last he spreads it wide, leaving only the sleeves to cover Kili’s body from the chill. The boy makes a choked noise in his throat and his limbs shift as if trying to cover himself, but he lacks the strength to even raise them from the pallet. His legs are folded untidily to one side, hip jutting out where his pelvis is twisted. His body is pale beneath his shirt, in the places untouched by the sun, quite unlike the nut-brown of his cheeks. Thranduil remembers when there were dwarves in the world who did not leave their caves for decades. Their skin was never blemished or veined. It stayed creamy and soft like Kili under his clothes. Thranduil liked them better like that, white as clover-honey, barely speaking the common tongue, uncorrupted by the world above. Dwarves go bad in the sun, Thranduil thinks. 

The shape of Kili is cut out against the dark bedclothes like a lily on water, interrupted by the burst of red where he is bleeding. To Thranduil it looks like a heraldic device. He wants to plaster the image on pennants and tapestries, he wants it recorded, distilled and preserved. It is so elvish to recreate reflections of beauty, in gems and weaves and smith-work, but Thranduil thinks it a waste that only stars and flowers should be granted such attention. Why not this dying, young dwarf with his clothes askew and his lips peeling? 

Thranduil’s breath is shallower and quicker now, but he controls it.

His fingertips linger along the line of Kili’s collarbone and then he moves to the bloodied bandages over the spear-wound. He takes a short knife from his boot and cuts the cloth away layer by layer. They are fouled and should be thrown away, and he does not have the patience to sit the dwarf up long enough to unwind them. The blood is still oozing and the bandages come away easily from the wound. The butt of a heavy, iron spearhead protrudes between his ribs. It must have missed his heart by a hair.

Thranduil takes a folded corner of fresh cloth, wets it and begins to clean the worst of the gore away from the spearhead. Kili gasps at the touch and turns his head towards the elf at last, blinking. His mouth moves, but it takes him a moment to form the word.

“Tauriel?” he says. Thranduil glances at him. He must have a lot of the poppy in him to mistake the king for _her_.

“No. She is not here,” he says. It is not really a lie. His young captain of the guard has been gone for hours, but the dwarf will have little knowledge of the lands beyond the sea where she has flown (impatient child that she was). Besides, one cannot really lie to mortals; most have no concept of the truth, no understanding of life and death among the Firstborn, and such ignorance is particularly profound among the soulless _naugrim_. 

“Where’s my brother?” the rasp is barely louder than a breath.

“He’s fine. Hush now,” Thranduil puts his hand over Kili’s eyes as if to calm a skittish horse. After a moment’s thought he twists up the cloth in his hands and tugs Kili’s jaw open, putting the damp, bloodied cloth between his teeth. “Bite down on that. Bite hard.” 

Without further warning, still covering Kili’s eyes, he digs his fingers into the wound, seizes the spearhead and pulls it out in one swift movement, murmuring swiftly, telling the blood to unclot from its grip around the iron, telling the iron to follow the same path out that it created as it entered. His words are drowned out by Kili’s muffled scream through the gag, but still the boy does not have the strength to move much and the spearhead comes out as cleanly as it can. 

Now Thranduil locks both hands down over the wound, pressing the two edges together, chanting in his birth-tongue. He can feel air rushing from a lung no longer corked by iron, feel fresh blood welling up between his knuckles, but he lowers his head and he commands this body to fight its inevitable death for a little longer, commands the cage of ribs to close back over its precious cargo, for membranes to hold fast and for this boy to live; and he will. He will live. 

Blood thickens. Cartilage ropes ribs together. Magic crystallises in the dwarf’s flesh. Thranduil lets out a slow breath as exhaustion leaves him swaying. The healing is done for now, though he will return in a few hours to see if it has held fast. Thranduil takes the gag from between Kili’s slack lips, for the boy has fainted again. He finds the muddy trousers and undergarments, separating them with his fingertips while he wrinkles his nose, and tugs them back over Kili’s feet layer by layer. Thranduil misses the sight of his hips as soon as they are hidden, but does not hesitate to fold the ruined tunic closed over his chest, doing the buttons up again in reverse order. He smoothes away wrinkles in the cloth and pushes Kili’s hair out of his eyes, combing it down with his fingers. At last he replaces the blankets and touches the back of his hand to Kili’s forehead to make sure no chill remains in his skin.

Thranduil takes his coat and leaves the room. His breathing and heart have returned to their resting pace. He has no idea how much time he has spent in this tent. In the outer chamber, only Oin is still awake, the others sleeping on blankets at his feet. He stands up as Thranduil emerges.

“I heard the lad cry out—” the old dwarf croaks.

“Always a good sign,” Thranduil says briskly. “There is life in him yet. He asked after a brother. Dead in battle, I presume? I did not have the heart to tell him.”

“No! No, Fili is alive,” Oin frowns.

“Is he? They did not ask me to see to a third dwarf.”

“Well, he’s not too bad,” Oin spreads his hands. “Bit banged up. I’ve seen lads get worse falling off ponies.”

A flame stirs and crackles in Thranduil’s belly. He feels disappointed – he feels _cheated_ , like a guest who has been given the second-best room. “I’ll be the judge of that. I did not promise to save these two from the brink of death and let the third succumb to some minor wound left untreated. Where is he?”

“But Thorin needs you now,” the wrinkles on Oin’s brow grow deeper, and he is wringing his hands again. It is beginning to get irritating. Thranduil wants to leave Thorin to last. It is the symmetry of the thing.

“Where is he?” he repeats.

“He said he’d get stitched up with the rest of the warriors so I could focus on Thorin and Kili,” Oins huffs. “He’s in the common tent with the rest of Dain’s folks. I’ll show you over there.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the support everyone /o\ this whole thing was so skin-crawlingly creepy to write that I wasn't sure how it would go down.

Thranduil almost turns back from the infirmary tents. There are so many dying here, crying in their agony, he wants to heal them even knowing he would never have the strength to save them all. His mind begins to catalogue them, seperating those who have no hope from those who need his care at once and those who most risk infection and those others who will survive on their own but could be spared blindness or a lifetime’s dependence on the crutch. He has to force himself to look away. He has agreed to save two dwarves’ lives. No more. 

He finds Fili in a corner with the less urgent patients. A blanket is wrapped around shoulders and one leg is stuck out in front of him. Thranduil is surprised by his gold hair, thick and matted as raw wool. He has seen the colour on dwarves before, but not for a long, long while – it was never in fashion when Erebor prospered, and any noble or merchant’s son Thranduil encountered had dyes and ochres to darken their braids. He supposes that expensive trifles like indigo powder were not so common in Ered Luin, and he feels a throb of heat deep inside him at the novelty. 

The dwarf recognises Thranduil but the fear in his eyes is out of proportion. He clutches the blanket tighter and opens his mouth as if to cry out, too breathless to make a sound. He has sharp, blue eyes; Thranduil cannot look away from them.

“Come with me,” Thranduil says, half turning away. “Somewhere quiet.”

The dwarf staggers to stand on his good leg. “I – I can’t walk – ” he croaks.

“You can walk,” Thranduil replies, and leads him to a low door beyond which is a rough, canvas shelter, little more than a tarp spread over four adjoining outer walls of the surrounding tents. Each step, Fili puts his bad leg down slowly and with gritted teeth. They are encircled by crates and bags of supplies, bandages and stretchers and medicinal herbs and salves, but they have some privacy for now.

Thranduil turns back to the dwarf, who is still wrapped in his blanket and wincing from more than just the bad leg now. All the blood has drained from his face in only the last few moments, and his knuckles show white through his skin where his fists are wrapped around the blanket. 

“Please,” he whispers. “Just tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Thranduil asks.

“Which of them has died,” Fili lifts his gaze and after a moment a wrinkle appears between his eyes as the silence draws out between them. “You’re not… not here with news?”

“I can give you news that there is no news, except that I have staved off your brother’s death for a little while longer,” Thranduil raises an eyebrow. “Perhaps indefinitely. We’ll know by morning.”

Fili closes his eyes and raises his fist, still clenched around the cloth, to press it against his shivering lips. He breathes in deep, and out again, suppresses a sob that rocks his body in silence.

“I came here to see to your injuries,” Thranduil paces towards a crate nearby bearing jars of some greyish unction. He lifts one out, unscrews the cap; a sniff tells him it is worthless and he replaces it. 

“I’m not in need of you,” Fili says coldly. “Stay with Thorin and Kili.”

“And you understand their need better than a healer, do you?” Thranduil spins on one heel. 

The boy raises his head. The lamplight flashes in his blue eyes and Thranduil feels something deep in him pulse. His father taught him to raise horses, but not to breed those that could not be broken. He cannot pretend any longer that he agreed to this deal for charity. 

“You feel guilty,” he says, stepping at an angle that brings him closer to Fili, yet without deigning to look him in the eye. “You did not protect them.”

“I did all I could!” Fili cries, his voice rent like steel beneath a warg’s jaws.

“Then why do you stand before me boasting that you do not need healing? You held back, you saved yourself first.”

The dwarf’s breath hitches. “That’s not what happened. I – I couldn’t get to him – and when I did, all I could do was – cover him – take the blows –”

“Show me,” Thranduil turns towards him at last, hands making a steeple at his waist. “Let me help you.”

Fili draws in a breath and then lets it out again as a stream of vapour in the cold air, staring at some point around Thranduil’s knees, and at last says with a tremor in his voice. “Alright. But it’s nothing, really…”

“Show me,” Thranduil repeats, standing at his left hand now, close enough to see flecks of mud on the crown of his golden head. “Undress.”

The dwarf’s gaze jerks up, but Thranduil’s withholds all expression from his face. Hunching over beneath the blanket, Fili’s fingers fumble with the ties of his jerkin. Thranduil waits as one sleeve and then the other is slipped off with a hiss, and the blanket clutched tighter as the jerkin is cast away onto the grass. Fili glances up at Thranduil, who intones. “And the rest. Or are you limping for sympathy?”

Fili’s brows tighten and he flinches, and kneels to undo his boots. He grunts as he bends the troubled knee, bowing his head to hide his face, and has to help that foot to step out of the shoe with a hand around his ankle. He peels his trousers off and straightens up, completely bare now but for the cocooning blanket. He keeps his weight on his good leg, toes curling in the dewy grass, staring straight ahead. 

Thranduil circles around behind him and finally kneels in front of him. Fili licks his lips, beginning to shiver now. They are almost eye to eye; Thranduil is still a little taller. He takes hold of the edges of the blanket below Fili’s chin, where his hands clutch it close, and pulls it open until Fili lowers his hands to his waist. The rough linen pools behind him like a ceremonial robe. The muscles of his arms clench and shudder against the chill. 

The fur on his body is as fair as his head, and thicker than his brother’s. It cannot hide the bruise smeared dark and misshapen on his chest, at the height of his elbow. Thranduil lays his fingers on it with smooth precision, one hand wrapping around Fili’s side and the other pressing fingertips over the black centre of the injury. Fili hisses in pain as Thranduil leans in.

“Ah, ah – stay still,” Thranduil says, and Fili holds himself tense. Thranduil probes the injury again. He can sense the cracked bone beneath, and the burst vessels weeping into the living meat, but his gaze is shifting away from the bruise when he tries to concentrate. His fingers splay slowly and he has to close his eyes to drink it all in. Now he can hear only the hitch of Fili’s breath, feel the rough hair catching on his skin, that warmth of a mortal, broad chest, the like of which he has not touched for so very long.

He fights not to slide his hand further up Fili’s chest, or more dangerous still, down to his belly. He almost loses the battle. It would be so easy, to feel the rise of soft nipples at his touch, bend to press his face to that thick hair and breathe deep. It would be so easy, and he knows the dwarf would not whisper in any ears that matter. Who would believe him?

But a king should have more control. Thranduil draws his hands back, opening his eyes. “Two cracked ribs, but unless you do something foolish they’re in no danger of piercing anything vital. Show me your knee.”

He meets Fili’s eyes, and sees them wide and the pupils blown wide. For a moment Thranduil thinks that it is arousal, but he is wrong. Fili draws away and flinches as he inadvertently stands on his bad leg. Thranduil shakes his head at him and takes hold of the knee.

“It’s fine,” Fili croaks. “They pushed it back in. There’s nothing broken.”

“I would have done it better,” Thranduil replies, digging his thumb into a hot swell of muscle that harbours a ligament on the brink of tearing. Fili tries to pull away again and Thranduil grips him tighter. “Put your weight on it. I need to see how the joints bears up.”

“It hurts.”

“I know it hurts,” Thranduil snaps. In the long pause that follows, like a physician following a vein, his hand slides higher up the inside of Fili’s thigh. The hair is downy here, the skin softer. The muscles split to anchor around his pelvis, young and healthy but trembling from exhaustion and the brush of Thranduil’s palm.

As if the break into Thranduil’s thoughts, Fili leans suddenly into the bad leg, biting down on his lower lip. Thranduil can feel the slick heads of the bones sliding into place, bones that are heavy, hard and steady like the war machines that came out of the Black Lands millennia ago. Dwarf bones break rarely; Fili’s cracked ribs may heal cleanly, but they belay a blow that would have shattered an elven skull or pulped a human elbow. It is the membranes and tendons that Thranduil worries about, the cloth and rope of a dwarf’s body, stretched and twisted every day under strains that the finest stallion would struggle with. But dwarves endure. Thranduil has often wondered if they feel less pain, or if the low pain of their own bodies is so constant that they carry on regardless, not knowing any better (it might explain their ill-tempers). Or perhaps the alchemy of their limbs and muscles really is so different from the other races that they are even more robust to damage than Thranduil has estimated. It is an important question for a healer, but he has not had enough opportunity to answer it before now. Perhaps that will soon change.

“There is nothing to do but rest it,” he says, releasing Fili’s leg and rising to stand over him. “Keep off it, and bind it if you must walk on it.”

“That’s what Dain’s healers already told me!” Fili spits at him.

Thranduil looks down at him in silence, tilting his head. He waits for a long time, until Fili shrinks down to grab his clothes and pull them on, clumsily, trying to hold the blanket around him at the same time. He attempts to hold Thranduil’s gaze as he does so, but he is shivering badly from the cold now. When he ducks his head to pull his shirt on, Thranduil turns and leaves him without another word.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for reading, everyone, I promise every comment about creepiness and discomfort makes this fic feel like a success. Thorin's chapter might be a bit different; despite a lot of reworking, right from the start I couldn't imagine it being otherwise.

Thranduil crosses the mud paths worn into the scratchy, silver grass around the camp. The sky is clouded to blackness and there is the distance men are weeping, and beneath them is the the wet, mouthy sound of crows feasting. Thranduil cannot get the pace of his heart back under control and he is not sure why. Strange. He pauses outside the royal tent. His thoughts slide away like a quiet dusk was falling inside his mind. 

He enters.

Thorin, the King Under the Mountain, is awake in a back quarter of the tent. Oin is with him, helping him drink broth from a bowl. He chokes on it, turns his head away, groans and clenches his fist around the empty air as Oin grips his arm and puts the bowl aside. Thranduil can smell the salt and meat in the air. Oin raises his head.

“You may go,” Thranduil says.

But the healer looks to Thorin first. Thorin nods and falls back against the pillows, turning his face away. His breathing is shallow and laboured. Thranduil kneels by his side. For a long while he waits in silence for Thorin to look at him.

When he does, his gaze is unfocused but steady enough. “Come back tomorrow, elf king,” Thorin rasps. “I can’t sleep with you watching me like a carrion-bird.”

Thranduil raises one eyebrow. At last he says. “We fought a battle together, this day. Can we not keep from arguing for one night?”

Thorin narrows his eyes, or perhaps he does not have the strength to keep them open. He drags for breath. “Only if I don't have to look at you."

Thranduil drops his gaze. He stares at Thorin's hand, the knuckles bruised and split, mud and scabs beneath the nails, trembling at the wrist. And yet there is still strength in it as Thorin grips the blankets over a new flood of pain. His gaze drifts away from Thranduil’s face.

“Close your eyes if you want to avoid me, but I must stay,” Thranduil says. “There is general agreement that you should remain alive, and I have been appointed your keeper until you can do the job yourself.”

With what seems like a great struggle, Thorin looks back at him. In the quiet, Thranduil hears a dwarf snoring in another part of the tent, and there is a flapping of wings as a crow lands on the roof above them. Thorin speaks at last, “Oin says Kili may yet live because of you.”

“We shall see,” Thranduil replies.

Thorin breathes in, finds some resistance in his lungs and coughs, his whole body shaking though the sound itself is weak. There such agony in his face that Thranduil is reaching for the jug of water before he realises what he is doing. When Thorin struggles to raise his head to drink, Thranduil wants to hold him up, dig his long fingers into Thorin’s braids, press the water to his lips. His hand is trembling and outstretched towards the pottery cup beside the bed. His knotted thoughts fight each other: he wants to take the cup, no, he wants to hold back, _no_ , he wants to help Thorin drink, and now it is too late. The coughs subside. 

Thorin falls back against the pillows.

“I thought I would do anything to avoid being in your debt, but this debt I take gladly,” he whispers, staring at the shadows of the canvas ceiling. It is the closest he will come to ‘thank you’. 

Thranduil finds the cup is in his hand. He doesn’t remember picking it up. He puts it down again on the low table, an ugly, squarish thing with thin legs that must have been brought out of the mountain. He wants to believe that he left Thorin to the last because he enjoyed the anticipation, and now he feels bitter disappointment at his own self-deception. His mouth tastes ashy. There is a whisper at the back of his mind, loud as a drop of water in some subterranean lake, _He doesn’t want you._ It drips, waits, and then: _Anymore._

Thranduil’s thoughts roar over the whisper. _Wild horses don’t know better. I know better._

The whispers subsides with a chuckle and a handful of echoes _… should know better than to open their gates…_

Thorin raises his shaking hands to his chest and begins to unbutton his shirt. Thranduil looks away. He hears Thorin growl, “You’ll need to stand the sight of me if you’re going to help me, elf. And you might as well look. You’ll not be seeing it again.”

“You’ve said that before,” Thranduil snaps back.

Thorin does not answer, but his ire is clear in his heavy brows. Thranduil lays his hands on his bare and bleeding chest. There are silver threads, some dyed crimson, and gaps with old scars that Thranduil does not recognise. He works quickly. The wounds are deep, but they are nothing that is likely to claim the king before the morning. 

Still the healing takes hours, until dawn is on the verge of breaking outside. When it is time to replace the bandages Thranduil looks up and realises that Thorin has fallen asleep. The pain has faded from his face and his breath is strong and regular. His bleeding has stopped altogether, his liver sealed along its splits, his skin knitting faster than Thranduil had expected. The wounds from this battle will leave barely a hint of a scar, only black-furred, too-smooth skin even wiping away any old sword blows that it crosses. 

Thranduil winds the bandages around and around Thorin’s torso, digging his hands under his heavy body to complete the circle. Thorin does not wake. Thranduil leans back once the cloth is tied off, watching the King Under the Mountain lie exposed and unguarded. The wind has picked up outside and it drums the canvas and then flies wailing on up the valley. 

He leans over Thorin, resting his weight on one hand on the far side of Thorin’s body. Then, before he knows what he is doing, he climbs silently up onto the rough-made bed, feeling the ragged mattress barely sink beneath his elvish weight. He swings one leg over Thorin’s body, knees bracketing the dwarf’s hips and hands on either side of his shoulders. The inside of Thranduil’s thighs are clothed in wine-red cloth and are still a good inch or two from contact with Thorin’s legs. Thranduil feels perfectly balanced. His muscles do not strain at all to hold himself aloft. 

For a long time he looks down at Thorin’s sleeping face, keen eyes studying the lines that define his lips, the wrinkles on his brow, the slow inhale through that great, mountain-peak of a nose. His white-gold hair hangs over one shoulder and mingles with Thorin’s thick, ratty tresses. At last Thranduil arches his back and lowers his head until his mouth is less than an inch from Thorin’s eyelid. He feels the faintest brush of lashes against his lower lip and warm breath against his neck. He moves up and over the topography of the old dwarf’s face until he reaches its edge, where he closes his eyes and breathes in the scent of Thorin’s hair. 

His father taught him to raise horses, and never to give up on the wild ones who return to the pasture.

He withdraws, slips back onto his feet and goes to wash his hands in the cooling basin of water. He closes the torn shirt over Thorin’s chest and ties it off. He stands and leaves. The tent is dark now, but there is a crack of light coming from little, octagonal side-room. The golden plates glint on the walls as Thranduil steps towards it and opens the heavy flap with his long fingers. He takes a step over the threshold.

Young Kili lies where he was left, sleeping soundly in the light of a golden lamp with fresh colour in his cheeks. His untied boots stand to attention below his feet. By his side sits his brother, leaning against the pallet with his head drooping. But as he catches Thranduil out of the corner of his eye his chin jerks up and his eyes glint. He reaches a protective arm across Kili’s chest, his nostrils flaring and his teeth gritted so hard his moustache trembles.

“He still needs care,” Thranduil says coolly. “He may yet die.”

“Touch him again and we’ll have a death between us,” Fili snarls. “But it won’t be his.”

Thranduil glances at the pale bandages showing through the bloody hole in Kili’s tunic, and he says nothing. He lets the canvas fall closed behind him.

He returns to his own tent, the inside walls bare of any decoration, the cloth still imbued with the scent of wet ferns and fallen trees. He undresses and lies down. He thinks of the last time he hunted boar in Mirkwood when it was still green, and he thinks of soft fur over shivering, damp muscles, and of hot breath in his ear.

Mortals must be cared for, or they will kill themselves with their stupidity and impulsiveness. To care from them, you must gain something from them in return. Thranduil has learned this over the endless toil of years, and that lesson is the thin thread that holds him here, that keeps him from forgetting this world beyond the trees, that wakes him from his dreams of white shores and a sweet fragrance on the wind. Mortal lives may be as swift as sparks from a dying fire, but if he does not try to warm his cooling hands on the sparks, then what need has he for his skin and bones at all?

Thranduil knows in his old, old mind that the world is diminishing, that light and colour are fading from its fabric, and as each of his kinfolk go west they only hasten the decay. So he must remain. He must keep himself warm by any means. He must find a way to care for mortals. 

In the end it is for their own good.


End file.
